Technology, Drama, the Market, and I

January 31, 2013

“What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power,” novelist Michael Ondaatje writes in The Cat’s Table, and it was a strange coincidence that I came across this enigmatic line on the descent down from Davos, the Swiss ski resort that had just convened some of the world’s most powerful men and women for the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum.

Power circles

The paradox of Davos is that it is both highly public and highly secretive. Relationships and business transactions are on show, as much as they are taking place in back room meetings and private encounters on the peripheries, far away from the glitz and glamour and where the buzzing doesn’t need buzzwords. Davos is the great equalizer and the great divider at the same time. The hierarchies are both formal and explicit (manifest by the color of your badge), as well as situational and subtle, with small smart mobs forming around the most sought-after, both on- and offsite (“one minute you’re in, the next you’re out”), in emotional roller coaster, funicular, and shuttle rides between recognition and rejection, belonging and alienation.

I came for the second year, and for the second year I was badge-less, attending as a member of my boss’s, Doreen Lorenzo, entourage (full disclosure: I also serve on the Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Values). I observed the program from the sidelines, with the humble but notable privilege of being able to partake in many of the social functions. The only way to bridge the inevitable gulf that opened at the beginning of each encounter, each conversation, was with a condensed version of “my story,” because, unlike that of regular attendees, it wasn’t printed in large letters on a white badge that would have instantly legitimized my identity and affiliation. But I suspect I wasn’t the only one feeling vulnerable. Everyone does in a setting like this, and only those who feel at ease with high levels of social discomfort and fully open up to the sway of serendipity will experience the most meaningful “Davos moments.”

Of which there were many, both fleeting and lasting – from private dinners on the Schatzalp, a mountain top that allegedly inspired Thomas Mann’s famed ‘bildungsroman’ The Magic Mountain; to adventurous bus rides with militant skiers and mildly tolerant locals; and silent periods of total exhaustion, shared with dozens of strangers, leaning over laptops in collaborative pop-up office spaces along the ‘Promenade’ (the village’s main street that serves as a catwalk for all of the Davos cast and colorful characters).

Davos is full of stories, of course; it is a multi-layered conversation desperately trying to keep pace with the constantly evolving memes and shapes of our economies and societies, relying on a lingua franca that is dominated by technology and management jargon, as well as a stubborn belief in rationality and in balanced multi-stakeholder solutions. Only recently has it broadened its vernacular and vocabulary to include the language of art (heart), and to juxtapose our biggest societal challenges with a more personal quest for meaning, understanding that the two are as interwoven as the circles of power in Davos.

Magic mountains

While the session titles of the Annual Meeting program hinted at these greater philosophical questions, they were only the tips of the icebergs. Yet in the best case, when the fault lines from business, technology, science, politics, religion, and culture converged, they revealed another sort of “magic mountain,” simultaneously elusive and concrete, rich with ambiguity and friction. The best sessions created spaces where avant-garde thinking was rooted in popular demand, elevation balanced with grassroots concerns, and profound knowledge was paired with an unshaken and perhaps naïve belief in “betterness” (Umair Haque) and in positive transformation.

Major themes that emerged during the week were those of the “circular economy” and “resilience,” the latter of which had inspired this year’s Annual Meeting’s theme of “Resilient Dynamism”. The ‘circular economy’ seeks to decouple growth from resource constraints by introducing reverse logistics and heightened consumer awareness. It is not a new concept, but due to the mysterious moods of the Zeitgeist and the vocal presence of evangelists such as Ellen McArthur of the Ellen McArthur Foundation, it garnered significant traction in Davos as a new economic innovation for the business mainstream.

Somewhat related, the rise of “resilience” (propelled by widespread acclaim for Andrew Zolli’s and Ann Marie Healey’s book of the same title, whose release uncannily coincided with Hurricane Sandy and therefore immediately received a lot of media play), describes a set of alternative, systemic ways of rebounding to the whim of forces beyond our control. It signifies a new school of economic thinking that favors nimble, highly adaptive systems over more robust, ‘sustainable’ ones, in a response to irrationalities and externalities that elude traditional categories of strategic planning and management. These systems, according to the economist Nassim Nicholas Taleb, amount to a situation of “anti-fragility,” tolerating just enough inherent fragility to quickly recover from “black swans”, or highly improbable external disruptions. In a similar vein, Said business school professor Rafael Ramirez advocated a more “pluralistic” notion of strategy (reminiscent of Stuart Evans’ model of “super-flexibility” that views strategy as a portfolio of ever-changing planes and gears).

Moreover, among many other topics, there were panels on China’s soft power, on meditation, decision-making, “mindfulness,” “transformative art,” “beliefs that bond,” the “culture of economics,” smart cities, “digital norms”, the “art of leadership,” the “happiness factor,” the “moral economy,” and “objects of culture.” There was also a wonderfully optimistic session on the future of online education that impressed on the audience that we are indeed witnessing a revolution – the impetus is radical, the outcome is unclear. The three big “revolutionaries” in this space – Coursera, Udacity, and edX – were represented, but the true star of the panel was 12-year old Pakistani girl Khadija Niazi, who was interviewed by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and shared how online classes on Udacity had changed her life.

Civil society and "beautiful organizations"

The broad variety of issues illustrates the Forum’s holistic view of our global economies, understanding them not only as financial markets but as arenas for sympathetic interactions that foster the very social fabric of our societies. This mindset was further bolstered by the ostentatious inclusion of additional and often marginalized constituents: While there were still only 17% female participants (the same quota as in 2011), women leaders such as Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer, and IMF managing director Christine Lagarde counted as the most distinctive voices in the program. The Forum’s Young Global Leaders (leaders under 40) and Global Shapers (leaders under 30) communities were strongly involved in the program (encouragingly, 50% of them are women). And the civil society communities all played a prominent role – for good reason. PR firm Edelman’s 2013 edition of its influential Trust Barometer that surveyed more than 31,000 respondents in 26 markets around the world, released during Davos, indicated that civil society actors enjoy higher trust levels than business and politics when it comes to tackling some of society’s most pressing challenges. NGOs, labor organizations, faith groups, and a range of other emerging actors discussed a comprehensive report on “The Future Role of Civil Society” that the Forum presented in Davos; and the Arts communities, represented by such diverse figures as John Maeda (Rhode Island School of Design), Paulo Coelho, and Eric Whitacre, among others, countered economic logic with creativity and intuition.

With business leaders such as GE’S Beth Comstock they explored how companies can incorporate the arts in their leadership and decision-making frameworks, and whether our economies should expand their definitions of value-creation not just by categories of prosperity, happiness, and well-being (all of which legitimate concerns and arguably viable indicators of economic progress, and as such popular topics in Davos), but also those of aesthetics and transcendence. In this vein, Rafael Ramirez suggested we build “attractive organizations” that create beauty, and proposed an “aesthetical view of management” that is based on Aristotle’s concept of phronesis, which is often translated as “practical wisdom.” He asked civil society organizations, in particular, to create positive visions rather than merely providing efficient solutions to problems, and he called upon them to serve as arbiters of meaning.

Meaning

Apropos meaning. Emerging as a major theme at Davos, it was mentioned by CEOs, NGO and religious leaders, and academia throughout the five-day program – in sessions on values, civil society, and faith. Elif Şafak, the Turkish bestseller author, made a passionate case for ambiguity and doubt to avoid “living in a polarized world.” She heralded the power of the “grey zone” and suggested we add more commas to our identities (“I am a mother, I am a Christian, I love traveling, etc.”) instead of exclamation marks (“I am a Christian!”). Microfinance pioneer and Nobel prize laureate Muhammad Yunus reminded the audience that education must always include an education of the heart, an education sentimentale, and that rather than just acquiring new skills in pursuit of a career, we ought to learn to grow our capacities as human beings in pursuit of a common purpose, or “the meaning of life.”

It is perhaps no surprise that meaning and spirituality enjoyed such prominence this year in Davos, against the backdrop of a fragmented connected age so volatile that it seems to even lack the one historic watershed moment, the one crisis to agree on (as was the case in previous Davos meetings). In uncertain times, all we have is faith. Both religion and the “faith of the faithless,” the non-institutional spirituality, can serve as major individual and societal transformative forces with the capacity to combine private and public lives. Several panels viewed spirituality as part of our human dignity and demanded we reconcile our predominantly rational systems of politics, science, and business with a “sense of wonder” and a new appreciation of “the divine” in order to improve the state of our world. If spirituality imbues respect for “the other,” empathy, and mutual understanding, then it can indeed help foster our economies’ greatest resource in the connected age – collaboration.

Gianpiero Petriglieri, associate professor of organizational behavior at business school INSEAD and chair of the Forum’s Global Agenda Council on New Models of Leadership, consequently spoke in religious terms when he recommended we embrace “devotion” over the much gushed-about “passion.” Devotion stands for a lasting commitment to a conviction, cause, or belief that is less transient in nature and more grounded in a sense of identity and belonging.

And indeed: “What kind of a person do I want to be?” asked theologian Fr. Christopher Jamison in an Open Forum session on “Is Religion Outdated in the 21st Century?” – it will remain the main question for each of the over 2,500 official attendees, the assembled young and seasoned global leaders, far beyond Davos. Constantly reflecting on it may warrant that we follow these leaders, the so-called “Davos Men and Women,” not only to the next management paradigm or the ups and downs of (ir)rational exuberance, but to the creation of a global economy that is resiliently human and engages our complete selves, with head, hand, and heart.

It makes sense then that an artist, the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho, was the most retweeted attendee, and in one of his tweets he truly nailed the overall sentiment with practical wisdom: “Davos: either too hot (indoor) or too cold (outside). Like love.”

October 16, 2011

“So, what is the reason for your existence?” the German professor at a Chinese business school reception in Shanghai asked me, to start a conversation. I felt like ad man Don Draper in the TV series Mad Men when his false identity is unveiled. Who are you really? Caught off guard, I answered: “I’m a marketer.” The conversation moved on, others had wittier sound bites to contribute, and my unease continued. It had been weighing on me since I had put my foot on Chinese soil a few days earlier, and here in this beautiful mansion, confiscated by the government from the corrupt former mayor of Shanghai, it was a steady companion.

You may think that the homogenized cosmopolitan settings of the tier one cities Beijing and Shanghai would seem familiar and comforting to a seasoned Western business traveler like me, but this time the glitzy, uber-capitalist façade did not alleviate my profound sense of dislocation and alienation. I was a stranger and everything was strange to me. This sentiment was exacerbated when I checked into the Opposite House, a chic designer hotel in Beijing’s Sanlitun village district that literally comprises of two opposing halves, each housing generous rooms, connected through a vast space underneath, which is used as both art gallery and lobby. Designed by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma and catering to the ‘global soul,’ it was meant to make you feel at home in an open, accessible space of kindness, but it did the opposite to me. It manifested the Otherness of my being here, in the heart of this strange city, with other strangers, who, like me, probably had no clue and so, like me, just marveled at the strangeness of it all.

It occurred to me that the Opposite House was a metaphor for some of the issues I had been pondering for the past few months. “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, and while his words were infinitely wise, I thought that a more intelligent mind than mine may very well hold the two opposites, in Beijing or anywhere, but perhaps even the most intelligent mind would not necessarily be happy in doing so. It’s hard to be happy if you are denied a happy ending, and it’s an unpleasant, arduous task to withstand the temptation to reconcile dual or multiple truths. We are hardwired to believe – and to believe in one truth.

Having just worked through the intricacies of integrating a marketing function and harmonizing two brands (and very different business cultures), I know how exhausting it can be when there is always ‘the other side of the story.’ This ‘other side’ can be the externalization of effects (responsibility), or it can mean putting yourself in someone else’s shoes (empathy). What the other side rarely appreciates is how hard you have worked to be on yours, and how much effort it has been for you to truly believe in it. Whatever it takes then to make you switch sides (or at least recognize the opposite one), it must include some kind of reimbursement for the intellectual and emotional work that went into asserting and upholding your one truth. The grass may or may not be greener on the other side of the fence – the path there, the ‘empathy dividend,’ better be worthwhile. This is true for conflict management at the individual, institutional, societal, and international level: Israel and the Arab world, Shiites and Sunni, Pakistan and India, China and the US, North and South Korea, Occupy Wall Street versus the 1%, and the list goes on – the world is conveniently framed by antagonisms, by dualities that stubbornly resist both reconciliation and the parallel truths that Fitzgerald heralded.

China resolves dualities by grasping Yin and Yang as complementary, interconnected forces, and its defiance of dichotomous moral judgments is not always easy to accept for the Western mind. Henry Kissinger’s views On China are a notable exception to the many books (e.g. Martin Jacques’ When China Rules the World and James Kynge’s China Shakes the World) that have recently examined how an ascendant and increasingly confident China could affect the rest of us. Kissinger seeks to understand China’s place in the world from the conditions of China’s complicated history and rich culture, not through the lens of Western morale. Kissinger does not portray China as hegemonial power but as an introverted nation that aims at protecting its ideal of a ‘harmonious society’ by making calculated offensive moves. He compares them to the Chinese board game Weiqi where the onus is on strategic encirclement rather than the black and white of absolute victory or defeat. Morality, essentially, deals with the question of how we treat the Other – the one who is not identical with us. Empathy, or even sympathy, is its foundation. With respect to China, this raises the question: To what extent can you leave your comfort zone, your moral center of gravity, to understand the Other before your absolute truth becomes relative, your ethical behavior situational, and your moral compass rudderless?

Moreover, a concept of morality based on Otherness presumes the Cartesian continuum of Ego and Self. But what if the line between Self and Other is fuzzy? In his writings, the British moral philosopher Derek Parfit (who became famous through his teleporter thought experiment and was recently portrayed in this stunning New Yorker article) rejects the integrity of personal identity and instead proposes a reductionist view of human life that renders the Kantian concept of the Self’s moral autonomy obsolete. If parts of your brain cells were to be transplanted into another body, he wonders, what would that do to yours and the other body’s personal identity? Who would be you? Parfit claims there would be two Selves (or none). Consequently, morality, in his view, is meta-personal and non-relational, and can only be derived from universal truths. To him, the loss of the concept of a separate Self is liberating, which puts him him in close proximity to Buddhists, who identify and recognize themselves in the Other:

“My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness... [However] When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.” [Derek Parfit]

Sam Harris’ latest book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values covers reductionist terrain as well, albeit from a very different vantage point. Harris seeks to constitute moral relevance from the alleged objectivity of scientific findings. But do we really want to entrust science all of our moral decisions? Science is not an authority on morality; it is its very subject. The moral landscape is not as flat as Harris wants us to believe. Or to riff on William Gibson: “Morality is here, it is just not very evenly distributed.”

Trade is an arbiter of peace, as Pinker argues. Collaboration and inclusion produce morale, an effect that is amplified by the tremendous amount of social capital generated by social media and in particular through the principle of reciprocity at work on social networking sites. Facebook, through this lens, can be viewed as the biggest morale producer of our times, not in the sense of giving to charities or supporting causes one click at a time – the so-often-derided ‘clicktivism’ – but through rich interactions and an appreciation and experience of Otherness that is made possible through the voyeurism emanating from the transparency of individual behaviors at public display.

On the other hand, hyper-connectivity may yield the opposite effect: When everything and everyone is connected all the time, will the individual moral Self be neutralized by a seamless collective that absorbs Otherness into Sameness? In this vein, Eli Pariser argues that the Social Web is a self-selecting Filter Bubble, and that rather than experiencing the Other, we’re just experiencing an increasingly narrow projection of ourselves, so that our social graph, based on our web history of purchases, clicks, friends, and likes, will ultimately become congruent with the social universe of One. Then our lives and the lives of others will be identical, and even with our identity spread beyond our Selves, it will not occur in the way Parfit envisioned it.

This debate on the Other is the main debate we ought to have in light of the crisis of our economies. A ‘moral economy’ puts the Other at the center of all its activities, and if it truly does, it will no longer need the qualifier ‘moral.’ However, our largely secularized and rationalized economy is struggling to restore its moral and spiritual acumen (see Umair Haque’s musings on The Meaning Organization and my own piece on the Chief Meaning Officer), and simply borrowing best practices from religion as proposed by Alain de Botton’s “Atheism 2.0” (see a good rebuttal here) won’t suffice when what we are really lacking is not a practical “god-free” tool kit but an idealistic and spiritual vision, a social contract that is meaningful at the personal level. Economist Robert C. Solomon described it aptly: “Markets systems are justified not because of efficiencies and profits but because humans are first and foremost social and emotional beings, and markets provide a sympathetic community for social exchange.” Consequently, Brad McLane, in a recent Huffington Post article, makes the case for the role of a “Chief Community Officer,” a leader who can reconcile individual interests with the satisfaction of trusted cooperation (research has shown that trust and trustworthiness produce oxytocin, the “hormone of love”).

Embracing Otherness has been the foundation for business since its inception – business serves the Other, as in the customer, or the stakeholders of today and tomorrow (future generations), but it has gained new relevance. Another, perhaps more important side to it is innovation. Otherness is the very source of innovation. The deviation from the normal, the conventional, and the routine is how new and different ideas are born – ideas that change the world for the better, which at the end of the day is the entrepreneur’s fundamental moral obligation. This is the legacy of Steve Jobs and other “fools” who “saw the world as it is not” – and changed it.

The new moral leadership starts with business school education. Harvard Business School professor Rakesh Khurana therefore asks for a “reprofessionalization of the manager,” so that he can overcome the self-interest-driven homo economicus, the self-inflicted Machiavellian mechanisms of competition and short-term gain, and instead focus again on his true task – to build and nurture long-term cooperative relationships that allow an economy, a plurality of interactions and transactions between trusted and trusting Others guided by shared values, to thrive.

Back to the initial question: what justifies my existence? As a marketer, it is my responsibility to understand the Others and connect them through many parallel truths – even if it’s just for a moment, a flickering desire, a shared passion and experience, or a common purpose. I am an engineer of trust, and I enjoy communicating for the very act of communicating. I can create and cultivate “sympathetic communities” that rely on “woven interactions” rather than “vector communications.” In the best case, I can help build a house of opposites on the basis of the social capital and goodwill generated by meaningful brands that serve as moral stewards, embrace paradox, and balance the dialectic forces of competition and cooperation, codified behavior and open-ended innovation. I am not here to generate impressions; I am here to reward attention with lasting value.

December 28, 2010

It’s that time of the year again. The trend augurs are releasing their predictions for the coming year. Except for the analyst firm Gartner, that is, which already shared its "Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2011" in October this year – we shall see if the first-mover advantage will make them more accurate. The best forecast might still be the agenda for Davos, simply because many of the participants have the power to actually make the future happen.

Michael Schrage does not, but he is a keen observer. His “Top Six Innovation Ideas of 2011” set the theme for the whole bunch: since radical events of the 'black swan' kind are understandably hard to predict, professional future gazers usually focus on highlighting existing trends and their continued yet amplified impact in the new year. Another typical feature of trend lists is the excessive use of neologisms, preferably in the form of the noun-ification (oops) of nouns which untreated would sound all too common. Schrage, for example, coins the term “contestification” (“contests”? – nah!). Apart from that though, his list is interesting and sound: he cites touch screen user experiences (“having the right touch to get the right touch will become a desirable communications competence”); “WWWabs” (“not-quite-ready-for-prime-time alpha and beta versions of apps to explore and test”) as valuable playgrounds for companies as they shift from “R&D” to what Schrage calls “E&S - Experiment & Scale;” the rise of promotional platforms (“advertising will take a backseat to promotional offers as retailers and brand managers alike collectively decide that branding a promotion matters just as much as promoting a brand”); the “gameification” (here, he did it again!) of business (“the companies that succeed in gameifying their products, services, and brands will enjoy a certain Zynga in their step”); and the renaissance of lobbyism (“a charismatically innovative lobbyist may have a bigger impact on marketplace success in 2011 than the country's most savvy technologist or marketer”).

TechCrunch’s Erich Schonefeld seems to have looked into the same crystal ball as Schrage. He, too, argues that 2011 might be the year when “touch becomes central to the computing experience.” And in his tete-a-tete with writer and blogger Andrew Keen he addresses head on the warnings of pessimists like VC investor Fred Wilson who contend that irrational exuberance will inevitably lead to another crash: "Will 2011 Be 1999 All Over Again?"

Even further back to the future goes Alvin Toffler, the grandfather of futurology, who is not content with foresights for just the next year; he predicts “40 for the Next 40” – trends that will shape our world from now to 2050. It has been 40 years since he popularized terms such as “knowledge age,” “power shift,” “digital revolution,” or “information overload” in his landmark book Future Shock, all of which are now part of the mainstream lexicon. That alone should make you curious, but the outlook released this week by Toffler Associates is a bit of a letdown. Toffler still has an apparent knack for condensing disparate phenomena into succinct assertions, but none of his predictions are really surprising (just some examples: the growing geo-political power of ‘philanthro-capitalists' who eclipse national and multi-national organizations in influence on many global issues; a growing number of women in leadership positions; religious groups pushing to get into governments around the world; the continued rise of “open, collaborative innovation paradigms;” mass production that is increasingly replaced with on-demand, custom manufacturing of products and services, etc.).

But maybe that’s not the point. If “the future is already here, just unevenly distributed,” as William Gibson famously stated, then the futurologist’s task might indeed just be to collate various dispersed pieces and even out the distribution by elevating the predictable to the status of meta. Foreseeing the future is like innovation: a new application for an existing invention. There’s nothing wrong with that.

The most interesting example for this approach is one of the more provocative predictions in Toffler Associates’ report. Coining the term "obsoledge" (yep, another neologism, but more inventive than Schrage's), the group refers to knowledge's increasingly extremely limited shelf life and stresses that every chunk of knowledge will eventually become obsolete. Applied to Toffler’s own foresights, this means of course that everything we now purport to know about the future may not be necessarily wrong, but it may not matter anymore when the future arrives. In light of accelerated technology cycles, as well as economic and political shifts that will be as sudden as they are drastic, it might become more difficult for us to catch up with the future. In this sense, perhaps the next true “Future Shock” will be that in 40 years from now none of Toffler’s predictions will have become part of our cultural fabric, and we may not even recall any of them. In the best and worst possible cases, the future will finally be what it has always been – fully beyond our imagination.

January 18, 2010

As widely discussed by privacy advocates and blogs, Facebook recently changed some of its privacy settings. Users are no longer able to limit the viewing of their profile photos, home towns, and friends lists to only approved friends. Those are all public now by default. Moreover, Facebook’s new default settings “recommend” that dynamic content such as status messages and photos be made public. While the blogosphere still closely scrutinizes these changes and is aghast at Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘privacy is over’ claims made at the Crunchies awards (he didn’t actually say it verbatim but his statements more or less implied it), I have to admit I was surprised that all this stirred such an uproar. Facebook is only reacting to a larger social trend as it strives to become an asymmetrical and therefore more growth-enabled network (or communications platform) – like Twitter. Privacy, at least a more traditional notion thereof, is the collateral damage of this strategic agenda. With the value of reciprocity (narrowcasting) succumbing to the prospect of exponentiality (broadcasting), privacy is no longer commercially exploitable. “No one makes money off of creating private communities in an era of ‘free,’” writes social networking researcher Danah Boyd in a blog post in which she otherwise harshly criticizes Facebook’s move. The age of privacy as we know it might be over indeed. Is it worth fighting for?

Privacy (from the Latin ‘privatus,’ according to Wikipedia: “separated from the rest, deprived of something, especially office, participation in the government”), the “right to be let alone,” is considered a human right in most parts of the world, in spite of all cultural relativism. Historically speaking, privacy has undergone a remarkable evolution. Aristotle distinguished between the public sphere of politics and political activity, the polis, and the private or domestic sphere of the family, the oaks. If a citizen of Athens was a private man, then it meant he was stripped of any political office and therefore considered “inferior.” Later, in the enlightened civil societies of Europe, however, privacy became a hallmark of the bourgeoisie, a hard-earned privilege that marked the delineation between upper and working classes. The latter had work – if they were fortunate – the former “had a life,” because they could afford it. This life tended to be private, by definition. In the emerging information economies of the 20th century, various theories described privacy as control over information about oneself (Parent, 1983), while others defended it as a broader concept crucial for human dignity (Bloustein, 1964), or emphasized the social aspect of it with regards to enabling intimacy (Gerstein, 1978; Inness, 1992).

Throughout their historical mutations, the public and private spheres needed one another like yin and yang. Having a life was a private act, but only if it was publicly earned and respected. This dialectic relationship will always remain. There is no privacy without publicy and vice versa. And yet, while privacy may never go away as a philosophical counterweight to publicy, today it is publicy that counts as the new privilege of the digital upper class. Privacy has been marginalized to the fringes of a society whose modus operandi is based on the very public mechanisms of social sharing. In the digital era, a private life does not exist. Google ergo sum.

The search engine’s recent public stance against the Chinese government, threatening to shut down all its China operations after Gmail accounts of Chinese activists had been hacked, highlights this new power structure and the evolving value of privacy in our ever-connected world. When the privacy of Google’s users was violated, the company decided to respond with a public statement, mounting public pressure to press on an essentially private matter. Good for a company that does not want be evil, many people applauded, but it bore a certain irony that Google acted as de facto digital state with its own foreign policy. Isn’t Google, after all, built on the very principle of making private data public? Isn’t it because of Google’s mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” that we have come to terms with the fact that our online lives and afterlives will never be private again and will be perpetually archived in the very public cloud?

In the case of Google vs. China, what was bemoaned as the loss of privacy was in fact the lack of publicy. Privacy is the most precious asset in more or less closed societies in which trust is a scarce resource and true publics don’t exist. But as we live our lives in the openness of the web, isn’t it publicy that we need to enable and protect? An ideal publicy that is so transparent and democratic that it doesn’t need privacy as refuge?

It’s complicated. Stowe Boyd has declared this to be the “Decade of Publicy,” in which he expects “the superimposition of publicy on top of, and partly obscuring, privacy:”

“Publicy says that each self exists in a particular social context, and all such contracts are independent. (…) It’s as if we are gaining the ability to see into the ultraviolet and infrared ends of the social spectrum when we are online, and in some contexts we are dropping out yellows or reds. To those tied to the visible color spectrum we are habituated to, this new sort of vision will be 'irreal.' But ultraviolet has always existed: we just couldn't see it before. (…) This will be a fracturing of the premises of privacy, and a slow rejection of the metaphors of shared space. The principles of publicy are derived from the intersection of infinite publics and our shared experience of time online, through media like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. The innate capability we have to shift in a heartbeat from a given public, and our corresponding persona, to another, is now being accelerated by streaming social tools. This will be the decade when publicy displaces privacy, online and off.”

As we struggle to maintain the traditional, monolithic privacy-publicy dichotomy, perhaps we must start using a different terminology altogether and embrace a new concept: sociality. In a hyper-individualized society, sociality is becoming the main object of desire for individuals. Or as Markus Albers puts it in his forthcoming book about what he coins the Meconomy:

“The Meconomy does not entail a purely egoistic philosophy. On the contrary, it promotes a new culture of empathy and social engagement. As we increasingly decide for ourselves how, where, and with whom we work, the search for meaning gains more importance. The trend to combine economical with social engagement grows stronger. We want to do good, be happy, and make money. In the old patriarchal, hierarchical, and inflexible working world, these aims were often mutually exclusive. In the Meconomy, their combination is almost a precondition for success.”

The semantic coincidence is telling. “Me” desires “Meaning.” As much as publicy needs privacy and vice versa, the “Meconomy” needs the “Meaning Economy” – as its co-evolutionary, symbiotic partner. With meaning emerging as the core currency of all market interactions (because it is ultimately what consumers buy; and friends, fans, and followers buy into), people, organizations, and brands that provide meaning will be the power players of the new Me(aning) Economy – brands like Apple, conferences like TED, contests like the Olympic Games, sport clubs like FC Barcelona, media organizations like NPR, non-profits like UNICEF, and, yes, politicians like Obama.

Sociality may succeed privacy because it is a critical precondition for meaning. To be meaningful, meaning needs to be shared, and sharing can only occur in open social settings. Open social settings, however, by definition, compromise privacy, in all its four textbook modes (solitude, intimacy, anonymity, and reserve). Meaning means giving things a name, making sense of “Black Swans,” unexpected events. In other words: Only an event that becomes a story (which still is the most powerful social media of all times, a true evergreen on the social web!) is meaningful.

Thus, it makes sense to replace the strict privacy-publicy opposition with a multi-layered continuum along progressive levels of sociality. Sociality may turn out to be a much better variable for describing and regulating our digital lives. The question then no longer is how private we can be, but how social we want to be. Instead of privacy seetings, we should speak of sociality settings: The maximum number of friends we want to have; and through which channels we want to ‘socialize’ our contents etc. Privacy understood as sociality (as an enabling and not a defensive right) grants us the ability to control who knows what about us and who has access to us, and thereby allows us to vary our social interactions with different people so that we can control our various social relationships at different levels of intimacy.

This new sociality is most visibly manifest in online social networks. It is worth noting that these not only mirror the mechanisms of offline social interactions but actually provide users with more control over their privacy (or sociality) than they would ever have in the physical world. On Facebook and other networks, you can pick and choose the people you want to meet and share ‘presence’ with; in a restaurant, bar, and other public spaces, you can’t. Exclusivity in the real world needs to be earned, whereas online it is a given.

Bill Thompson pledges we should embrace the new liberties that come with this new radical transparency:

“The enlightenment idea of privacy is breaking apart under the strain of new technologies, social tools and the emergence of the database state. We cannot hold back the tide, but we can use it as an opportunity to rethink what we understand by 'personality,’ how we engage and interact with others and where the boundaries can be put between the public and private. Those of us who are ahead of the curve when it comes to the adoption and use of technologies that undermine the old model of privacy have much to teach those who will come after us, and can offer advice and support to those who might be unhappy to have their movements, eating habits, friendships and patterns of media consumption made available to all. But every Twitterer, Tumblr, Dopplr or Brightkite user is sharing more data with more people than even the FBI under Hoover or the Stasi at the height of its powers could have dreamed of. And we do so willingly, hoping to benefit in unquantifiable ways from this unwarranted – in all senses – disclosure. I'll argue that we are in the vanguard of creating not just new forms of social organisation but new ways of being human.”

All this openly shared user data represents not only an enourmous amount of social capital but also a huge collective leap of faith. Whether the big digital platforms and ecosystems will honor this trust to maintain civic publics or if they will choose to exploit it for (private) economic reasons, at any price, will be one of the defining moments of this young decade and the most impactful decision it will have to make. Control (as the catalyst of privacy) is good, but trust (as the catalyst of sociality) is better. We can afford to lose our privacy, but we will not survive the loss of sociality.

January 16, 2010

In the wake of the devastating 7.0 earthquake in Haiti, Twitter has been serving as a main hub of information, the Nielsen Company reports. Nielsen refers to preliminary analysis of data indicating that Twitter posts are the leading source of discussion about the quake, followed by online video, blogs, and other social media.

Although most online consumers still rely on traditional media for coverage of the quake, they are apparently turning to Twitter to share information, react to the situation, and rally support. Sysomos, an analytics firm in Toronto, estimated that nearly 150,000 posts containing both “Haiti” and “Red Cross” were sent through Twitter since the quake. The Twitter account for the Red Cross, which on average had been adding roughly 50-100 followers a day before the Haiti quake, has gained more than 10,000 followers since.

Combined with tapping into the large mobile universe of text messages (136.6 million subscribers sent and received text messages in Q3 2009), many aid and relief organizations have begun utilizing Twitter to spread the word and gather donations, augmenting their other channels. As online conversations around the Red Cross’s 90999 text campaign ("Text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10 to @RedCross relief") efforts grew, the Red Cross tweeted Friday morning that donations exceeded $8 million.

But Twitter’s growing power comes with new responsibilities. In the aftermath of the disaster, some people used the micro-blogging service to spread rumors and falsehoods, i.e. that UPS would be willing to ship any package under 50 lbs. to Haiti (UPS debunked that myth). Twitter was also aflutter with news that several airlines would take medical personnel to Haiti free of charge to help with earthquake relief (American Airlines and JetBlue said this was not the case). The FBI warns Internet users who receive requests for charitable donations on behalf of earthquake victims to "apply a critical eye and do their due diligence" before responding. "Past tragedies and natural disasters have prompted individuals with criminal intent to solicit contributions purportedly for a charitable organization and/or a good cause."

What all this shows is that Twitter is not like Facebook (as much as Facebook is trying hard to be more like Twitter). Relationships are not reciprocal, and they’re not based on trust but on authority - a currency that is easier to fake. Twitter is much more like a 21st century CNN, a broadcasting network cum narrowcasting option, and as such prone to propaganda and misinformation.

We officially unveiled the new issue on Monday with an intimate TED Salon ("More Substance of Things Not Seen") with 120 TEDsters and friends at the Unicorn Theater in London. Hosted by Bruno Giussani, TED’s European director, and Sam Martin, editor-in-chief of design mind, the evening featured three TED Talks.

Fabio Sergio, creative director at frog design, explored the possibilities of using data produced by the human body to educate the human mind: "How to design (for) awareness and self-reflection? How to design platforms that people can use to encourage and challenge each other to follow what they believe are virtuous behaviors?"

His main proposition goes like this: We live in a world of data. From keeping track of our household expenses to sharing our running data with the community at Nike+: What happens if we go on with this idea and gain the ability to keep track of even more areas?

Sergio's vision can be neatly summarized as: track, share, and change. He sees four intersecting opportunities: Access to our own data streams and services to accrue and store our bit crumbs forever; individual and collective aggregations to reveal hidden patterns; well-designed interactive tools of self-reflection to visualize, manipulate, and shape raw data into meaningful information; and social networks that encourage and sustain virtuous behavior by treating it as social currency.

In his prediction, it is essential that we track more data of our lives, our behavior, and the things we use. To make this data more accessible, visualization is key. Secondly, the data that we collect should be made usable for our social lives. Thirdly, data analysis and sharing it with our environment to trigger social pressure could trigger change. An example: Imagine you could keep track of your Toyota Prius CO2 emission and share that data with other drivers on the road in front of you. A display in your car would show you that the Prius next to you has ejected fewer emissions than you. Wouldn’t this be the perfect challenge? Now imagine you could see your friends’, your family’s, your neighbor’s emissions. Instead of just saving the environment as a single player, it would transfer it into a collective challenge – a playful way to save our planet and a great way to show off in front of your friends at the next dinner party! "It's all about love and passion again," Sergio said, and "empathy."

Fields Wicker-Miurin, co-founder of Leaders' Quest, presented her vision of new leadership based on field-based insights from around the world. Wicker-Miurin trains business leaders by connecting them to other leaders. This sounds rather common - however, her leaders live in the Amazon forest or are advocates of HIV education in India or collect and display artifacts related to uneasy periods in Chinese history: they are leaders that face the real challenges of our time.

Wicker-Miurin spoke forcefully about Benki, a young tribesman from deep in the Amazon, facing the threat of deforestation, which not only has an impact on climate change, but also, much more immediately, on the existence of his people. Becoming a leader very early in life, he recognized that the environment, the animals, the rivers, the air he breathes and his tribe's existence were in danger. That's when he took a step out of the Amazon and traveled 3000 km to the Earth Summit in Rio -- to tell the world outside about the world inside the forest, and connect the two worlds. He spoke, but he also learned a lot, and brought those learnings home. Almost 20 years have past and the Ashaninkas (Benki's tribe) have reforested 25% of their territory, created schools, brought satellite Internet to the village, and more. After describing other profiles from around the world, Wicker-Miurin summarized the seven characteristics of the "new leaders": they go away from what they know; build bridges and walk across them; have a sense of the great arc of time; know that they depend on others; remember that “it's not about them, but it starts with them”; and have humility.

Misha Glenny, underworld investigator and author of the book McMafia-Seriously Organized Crime, is interested in different kinds of leaders: key figures in the "shadow economy" of organzied crime. In conversation with TED's Bruno Giussani, Glenny discussed very openly, and with genuine humour, his research methods, the encounters with his sources, and some behind-the-scenes episodes. Among many other things, we learned that the FARC had no interest in kidnapping him, that fake names are often references to characters in gangster movies, and that human traffickers and drug dealers were especially hit hard by the financial crisis. Glenny was also interviewed for the new design mind issue ("Hiding in Plain Sight").

Andreas Raptopoulos, founder of FutureAcoustic, gave an exclusive technology demo of reactive soundscapes. And singer/songwriter Lou Rhodes concluded the program with a stunning "unplugged" live performance.

The advance copies of design mind were in high demand.

The moderators, Bruno Giussani and Sam Martin, awaiting the "Substance of Things Not Seen"...

On the other side of the pond, simultaneously, the launch was more grassroots-style. Promoted via twitter, an ad-hoc group of 50 strangers (a Twitter Flashmob, if you will) convened at the café in our back alley at noon sharp, uttered the password “Oxford,” and picked up their free copy.

There’s already a lot of buzz about the magazine on Twitter (search for “designmind” and “frogdesign”) and on blogs. BusinessWeek just re-published Beth Comstock’s (CMO and SVP of GE) article from the new issue, in full content, online. Core77 has a nice write-up featuring frog designer’s Laura Richardson’s article, and so does Nathaniel Whittemore on Change.org. TED.com has highlighted the issue on its blog.

All photos by Robert Leslie (except for the one at the bottom, which is by Jacob Zukerman). You can find more on Flickr.

September 17, 2009

“Everything has symmetry when you just leave it where it is,” mathematician Marcus du Sautoy said in his talk at TEDGlobal in Oxford. Attending a TED conference is as asymmetrical an experience as you can imagine: Nothing is left where it is. The combination of riveting ideas and remarkable people you encounter is purportedly designed to disrupt your balance, routines of thinking, self-esteem, beliefs, values — even your sleep. After TED, you’re no longer congruent with your former self: You have seen things you have not seen before, you feel different, and you have been moved. Things have changed, and you know that only true passions cause real change.

After five days of delving into other people’s passions in Oxford, I felt that it was time to celebrate my own: football, a spectacle that combines archaic competition with sublime pleasure. In his scholarly essay “On the Alleged Dehumanization of the Sports Spectator,” Allan Guttmann describes football matches as cathartic events, “saturnalia-like occasions for the uninhibited.” So, on the first evening after TEDGlobal, I took the Jubilee line to London’s Wembley Stadium to see a rather meaningless preseason game between Tottenham Hotspur and a B-team of Europe’s current champions, FC Barcelona.

I’ve always thought — to paraphrase Pascal — that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not stay in a football stadium. A football arena is my refuge, my cave, my playing field, my “manspace.” After all the elevation, elusion, and enthrallment at TEDGlobal, I was craving a simple point of reference and a naive familiarity that only a football field can offer. Like a good pop song, it provides something archetypal that is immediately and permanently relevant, a way to look at life, a worldview. Football, like all sports, offers clear rules, and thus, comfort in a world of growing ambiguity. It satisfies the unfulfilled stories of our lives waiting to be resolved, catalyzed, and made sense of — by one single elegant sequence of interactions and passes that lead to the eruptive, collective, and yet so private celebration of a goal.

Football is like theater. It condenses all human emotions, all possible developments of a story onto one big stage that lies at the center of our attention for 90 minutes or more. Football gives its players the power to be the “authors of their own ambition,” as Alain de Botton suggested in Oxford, when he spoke about 21st-century career patterns. De Botton heralded tragedy as a more humane way to embrace failure and posited, “Hamlet lost, but he was not a loser.” Football possesses this appreciation for tragedy, too. Hearts will ache. Promises will be broken. Somebody will lose. But losers they will not be.

The football stadium is a space where the boundaries between player and spectator are still defined, but the distance from idea to implementation, the gap between unseen and seen, is negligible. A football game is a train of thought, a breathless stream of consciousness, but it is also the very act of acting itself. What you see is what you get. Football is “the head and hand united,” in the words of Richard Sennett, or better, the head and foot united. It is an accelerated microcosm of innovation, where the idea is the prototype is the product.

Brazilian footballer Ronaldinho once described it as follows: “What I do, always before a game — always, every night and every day — is try and think up things, imagine plays, which no one else will have thought of, and to do so always bearing in mind the particular strengths of each teammate to whom I am passing the ball. When I construct those plays in my mind, I take into account whether one teammate likes to receive the ball at his feet or ahead of him, if he’s good with his head and how he prefers to head the ball, if he’s stronger on his right or his left foot. That’s my job. That is what I do. I imagine the game.”

Players like Ronaldinho or the uniquely gifted Argentine Lionel Messi are artists, and like artists “they set up expectations of symmetry and break them,” as Marcus du Sautoy put it, “[because] in everything, uniformity is undesirable.” Innovation, which is needed to advance on the pitch, is asymmetrical by its very nature. The whole game of football is one big attempt to break symmetry through imagination and beauty.

At Wembley, my gaze traced the distinct white of the chalk marking the sidelines and penalty areas on the field, the calm before the storm, disturbingly quiet. I studied the goals, as they stood there, monolithic and self-absorbed, fully aware of their power to attract and fulfill that one simple desire. I admired their majestic symmetry that is only destroyed when man, goalie, enters the scene.

Below the main stands, I spotted Pep Guardiola, Barcelona’s coach, who had won all possible trophies with his club last season. And I recalled what TEDGlobal speaker Itay Talgam had said in Oxford about great conductors: They create the “conditions for the process to take place.” This is true for great football coaches, too. They simply enjoy watching and letting go — gaining influence as they embrace the loss of control over time and space, as some of the great players have in rare moments.

Spanish author Javier Marías’ story, “In Uncertain Time,” portrays Hungarian football player Szentkuthy, who, in the final minutes of a critical game rallies forward on his own, shakes off two defenders, and overcomes the goalkeeper. All that is then left to do is to slot the ball into the empty net, but even as the whole stadium rises to respond to the goal, he refuses to shoot. Instead, he advances, and stops the ball right on the goal line. Then, as the goalkeeper and the two defenders come running towards him, “Szentkuthy rolled the ball an inch or so forward and then stopped it again once it was over the goal line.” “He had thwarted imminence,” writes Marías, “and it was not so much that he had stopped time as that he had set a mark on it and made it uncertain, as if he were saying, ‘I am the instigator and it will happen when I say it will happen, not when you want it. If it does happen, it is because I have decided that it should.’” Szentkuthy’s action “pointed out the gulf between what is unavoidable and what has not been avoided, between what is still future and what is already past, between ‘might be’ and ‘was,’ a palpable transition which we only rarely witness.”

I was looking at the lush green of the football pitch that still allowed all possible mathematical configurations, all possible combinations of play. Seeing the unseen, I thought, means the ability to create multiple stories. Like dancers, football players interpret space, each in his own way. Everything is possible because anything is possible. Just as life, unfolding, is inevitable, so it goes with the referee’s first whistle: “It ain’t why, why, why, it just is” (Van Morrison). It simply happens — and afterwards, legions of commentators and analysts will attempt to reconstruct it, explain it, and demystify it, in vain.

As the teams entered the arena, 60,000 fans began chanting. The players occupied their positions — both teams lined up in a 4-4-2 formation, in perfect symmetry, anxious for the action to come. How I wished I could have held this moment of uncertainty a little longer, as Szentkuthy did when he stopped the ball on the goal line. I was thinking of my soon-to-be-born daughter and how her life and mine will be immediately and forever asymmetrical from the very minute she enters the world. I was thinking of the endless array of possibilities ahead of her.

Then the game began. I’d seen the substance of things not seen. Nothing would ever be the same again.

September 12, 2009

While the rest of the developed world looks at the controversy over healthcare reform in the US with a mix of embarrassment and disbelief, Americans have experienced a raging debate this summer that was to a large part driven by word-of-mouth online.

MotiveQuest, a research firm, has evaluated the healthcare chatter bouncing around the Internet. It pulled data from more than 100 health and political forums and blogs, representing more than 2,000,000 posts and 110,000 people in the average month. Categorizing the debate’s language into thematic groups (treatments, payment methods, doctors/patients, and the uninsured), it has tracked how the online conversation evolved over time.

September 04, 2009

Jeff Jarvis, who’s admirably trying to prevent the news industry from becoming the next music industry, recently wrote an interesting blog post in which he heralded “hyper-distribution” as a valuable new business model for news organizations. Responding to some industry pundits who propose embracing shrinking audiences as an effective means of consolidation and audience loyalty, Jarvis argued:

“Since when did it become OK for media people to shrink their audiences? Since they gave up on the ad model, that’s when. But I am not ready to surrender to the idea that advertising, which has supported mass media since its creation, is over. Yes, ad rates are lower; welcome to competition. That’s all the more reason why publishers must attract larger audiences publics – make it up on volume – as well as more targeted and valuable communities.”

To grow audiences through hyper-distribution, Jarvis proposes that news outlets utilize readers as distributors and embrace the very hyper-fragmented forces of the social web that might pose the most existential threat to them: reverse-syndication, “embeddable paper” formats, APIs, specialization, and engagement on social networks.

These are viable concepts (and some of them are already used, i.e. by the New York Times, the Silicon Insider, and others) but, if you were to be cynical, you could also view them as belated means of catching up to a new media reality in which the traditional notion of an advertising- funded news market is no longer valid. While hyper-distribution may provide formats for the post-article era, it still clings to the idealistic assumption that the world needs professional news organizations. But what if it doesn’t? What if the student who famously told the New York Times a year ago, “If the news is that important, it will find me,” doesn’t really consider news media to be trusted sources of news anymore, no matter how good they are in deploying social distribution channels to push them to him? What, in fact, if news brands don’t really matter anymore to Gen Y – as sources of news, trusted or not?

Arguably, CNN has lost some cachet through its #CNNfail debacle during the Iranian election (and similar defining news moments that seem to have shifted the intertwined powers of authority and attention to Twitter, i.e. the Hudson River plane crash and so on), and already, individual experts manage to establish themselves as the nimbler news aggregators on Twitter, cultivating individual audiences (of followers). What if the new news brand is @name? Or newsrooms, dispersed online, that converge amateurs, professionals, and experts? Google’s Marissa Mayer has hinted at what this scenario might look like: "hyperpersonal news streams," in which stories break like (Google) “Waves” and become the publication of collaborative processes rather than finished articles – constant iterations instead of interpretations.

Hyper-distribution may indeed overestimate the demand for trusted commercial news providers. As long as NPR, BBC, and other public services provide first-hand news coverage for free, chances are that the blogo-and Twittersphere will self-aggregate and hyper-distribute news without the mediation of commercial hyper-distributors. For them, innovating their distribution formats to catch up with social media may not be enough – they may want to innovate the very meaning of news. Rather than trying to generate incremental value against over-supply, they could generate disruptive value by creating a new kind of demand – pursuing a “reconstructionist” approach and yielding the type of “value innovation” that is commonly labeled under the sticky metaphor Blue Ocean Strategy.

And yet, two of the venerable US news weeklies, Time and, recently, Newsweek, are pursuing a third way out of the industry misery. They are neither adapting to the new rules of competition in a ‘red ocean’ nor are they creating a ‘blue ocean’ – instead, they are carving out a blue ocean within the red ocean, so to speak, by increasing their publications’ exclusivity. Both are deliberately reducing circulation to create a more loyal and targeted readership, and shifting their positioning from mere news engine to high-end background reportage and political commentary; and both are diametrically opposed to Jarvis’ hyper-distribution paradigm. Newsweek, 76 years old, is determined to shrink its circulation from 2.7 million to little more than half of that. Time’s circulation, which 20 years ago was close to five million, is now at 3.4 million.

Interestingly, it is another renowned weekly that presents the exception from this trend, and boasts surging circulation and ad revenue numbers: The Economist. According to the Publishers Information Bureau, the magazine’s revenues increased last year by a whopping 25 percent, whereas Newsweek’s and Time’s dropped 27 percent and 14 percent, respectively. With its US circulation nearing 800,000, TheEconomist may ultimately even overtake Newsweek in the States. Given that this growth trajectory has been consistent in the past few years, what is it that makes TheEconomist thrive while others are drowning in red ink? Michael Hirschorn, in a recent article in The Atlantic, opines that “The real value of The Economist lies in its smart analysis of everything it deems worth knowing – and smart packaging, which may be the last truly unique attribute in the digital age.”

Smart packaging of course means smart branding. The Economist has successfully branded itself as the de-facto print magazine for the global elite. “The secret to The Economist’s success is not its brilliance, or its hauteur, or its typeface,” Hirschorn contends, “The writing in Time and Newsweek may be every bit as smart, as assured, as the writing in The Economist. But neither one feels like the only magazine you need to read. You may like the new Time and Newsweek. But you must – or at least, brilliant marketing has convinced you that you must – subscribe to The Economist.”

Similar value is associated with Tyler Brule’s Monocle, a “briefing on world affairs,” as the monthly describes itself, delightfully packaged and suavely combined with fashion features, frequent traveler tips, and stylish gizmos – plus, online, a truly earnest old school radio podcast. The Economist and Monocle are both examples of the power of niche positioning, as Michael Hirschorn points out: “In the digital age, razor-sharp clarity and definition are the keys to success. Knowing what and who you are, and conveying that idea to an audience, is the only way to break through to readers ADD’ed out on an infinitude of choices. General-interest is out; niche is in. The irony, as restaurateurs and club-owners and sneaker companies and Facebook and Martha Stewart know – and as The Economist demonstrates, week in and week out – is that niche is sometimes the smartest way to take over the world.”

“News doesn’t build a brand anymore,” says serial German Web entrepreneur Alexander Görlach, who is poised to fill a niche with his new online magazine The European, which will launch at the end of September. Görlach believes that “To date, online formats have been designed as extensions of print outlet. But [in Germany], there is no autonomous online news brand that focuses exclusively on commentary and opinion.” The European will give experts and authors a voice, and cherish a culture of debate without violating the principles of the web by offering text-heavy articles. “Strong opinions. Journalism for the Web. No perks,” the tagline provides cues for what to expect. For US audiences, this formula may sound familiar: When Görlach promises rich multimedia programming and a departure from conventional section structures, one can’t help think that the Huffington Post is coming to Germany. In any event, The European, targeting 25-60 year old web users who earn more than 2,500 Euro per month, is one to watch, especially with a classy title like this that indicates that the publisher seems to have a good hand with branding and a confident, somewhat ironic grasp on history: "The European" was also the name of a British weekly newspaper in the 90s, billed as “Europe’s first national newspaper,” as well as that of a privately circulated cultural and political magazine that was published in the 50s. Obviously, neither lasted long.

The main lesson to be learned from the success of The Economist and Monocle and (quite possibly) The European: Culture beats economies of scale. Hyper-distribution (and hyper-localization) might be a (controversial) option for newspapers; it is certainly not an option at all for distinct magazine titles. For them, creating artificial scarcity in a sea of abundance – the essence of branding – remains the main imperative. I’m not saying that all outlets in the high-end category – The Economist, Monocle, Vogue, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, and others – can survive simply because of their strong brands, but they stand much better chances of maintaining loyal audiences because of it. Access to information is important, sure, and innovative distribution models are to be explored, too, but it all comes down to the power of branding, the power of your voice. Distinction saves you from extinction. What do you stand for? What do you know? What do you have to offer as a handle on the world, a firm point of view in a world that is increasingly complex and full of ambiguity?

If brand is so important, then why is BusinessWeek up for sale, a supposedly strong name? Well, maybe precisely because its brand has suffered. By pioneering a compelling, state-of-the-art web presence – one of the best among business publications – BusinessWeek may not have done itself a favor; rather, it inadvertently over-extended its brand and diluted its editorial voice. It has experimented a lot but not really carved out a new identity: Is it a business magazine, a news portal, a blog network, or a social network?

While BusinessWeek expanded into digital formats and gradually blurred the boundaries between its print and online offerings, TheEconomist succeeded by sticking to it guns. It was very late to the web game and in fact never really caught up to the latest trends (and fads) of online journalism. It did not embrace the principles of the “link economy” as BusinessWeek did so fervently, and if you ask anyone about The Economist, you will certainly hear that it’s a weekly print publication. That’s all. Similarly, German business monthly Brand Eins, an award-winning collection of philosophical essays and reportages on the people behind the numbers, has never really hidden its disdain for the web – and its print circulation keeps growing. Both Brand Eins and TheEconomist have never compromised their print brands, never open-sourced their content to anyone, and are now in the most enviable position to defy Jarvis’ calls for “hyper-distribution.”

Perhaps, the most innovative thing you can do if you’re a publisher these days is to ignore the action bias – and not innovate.

August 31, 2009

The Social Capital Markets (SOCAP) Conference, a landmark gathering of top business and government leaders creating market-based solutions for social impact, is taking place September 1-3, at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center.

SOCAP brings together a unique mix of the world’s leading social innovators – traditional investors, impact investors, social entrepreneurs, philanthropists, new media, NGO’s and non-profits, wealth managers, development agencies, venture capitalists, MBA students and other groups interested in the growing opportunities of social capital — who are catalysts of change across the globe.

Last year’s conference gathered more than 650 leading global investors and entrepreneurs from 26 countries. This year’s conference from September 1-3 in San Francisco is sold out again and features speakers from the Skoll Foundation, Participant Productions, Food Inc, GRITtv, LINKtv, Invisible Children, Global Giving, the World Economic Forum, Virgance, Kiva, Change.org, Ushahidi, McKinsey, The Economist, and many others. The opening keynote will be given by Sonal Shah, Director of the White House Office for Social Innovation.

“SOCAP09 is the premier event that puts the flow of capital to social good into a context,” says Founder Kevin Jones. “In these turbulent times, social innovators in the public and private sectors, from foundations to social venture funds to development agencies to grassroots Web 2.0 activists, are working together to build a new economic foundation for the world. With our expert speakers, high-impact sessions and exciting networking events, SOCAP09 is an essential gathering for anyone interested in the burgeoning field of social capital.”

I will be there, too, and report. You can also follow the conference online via: